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I have a friend who did his PhD studying Milankovitch cycles in the Netherlands.

When he defended his thesis, his friends presented him with the "milankofiets": a bicycle ("fiets", in Dutch) where the wheels were off-center, and the crown was elliptical (and also off-center). Biking it was very hard, and the speed would vary depending on the phase of each part of the bicycle.

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Come on, historians like epicycles. Which would be a proper name for that riding implement in English. (Presuming it's the stationary one.)

Anyway, we have math to prove any semistationary sequence can be broken down into a bunch of cyclical patterns "plus error". That says nothing about predictive value of that model.

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